25 Million Americans Jammed to Music Games in April
June 27, 2009 by srfto
Music games like Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Singstar, and the upcoming DJ Hero are obviously popular, but exactly how popular? According to Interpret, 25 million people in the month of April alone played some sort of music game, but that’s not all the data they found.
The rhythm game genre has been around for a long time, since 1996, to be exact. Parappa the Rapper was the first game of its kind and it snowballed from there. Hundreds of takes on how to combine music and video games together have come and gone since then — from Dance Dance Revolution to the virtually-unheard-of-outside-of-Japan Taiko Drum Master. But none of them really boomed in markets outside of Japan until Guitar Hero came and totally redefined what Western gamers thought of rhythm games.
The fact that they’ve broken away from “rhythm games” to “music games” is an indication of how the series redefined the genre. But who would have expected that they would have gotten popular enough to have 25 million people play at least one of them in only one month?
Nobody, really. But that’s not the only surprise bit of data Interpret found.
According to the report, 29 percent of music game players have downloaded or streamed a music video in the past three months. It might not seem big, but the overall percentage is a mere 15 percent. On top of that, 67 percent of them purchased more music CDs than your normal, everyday consumer and they are more likely to legally download music. Who’d have thought?
Seems what everyone thinks is a couch potato slacker is actually some sort of (arguably) upstanding citizen. Now if only they made a game where you play a flute..
- Share
Related posts:
